


To the Surreptitious Go the Spoils

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Beginnings, Bonding, Cheaters Never Prosper or Do They?, Cheating, Friendship, Gen, How a Friendship Starts, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 06:03:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15164246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Alex and Gary's friendship begins with cheating and secrets. Set before Alanna: The First Adventure.





	To the Surreptitious Go the Spoils

To the Surreptitious Go the Spoils

Gary prided himself on being clever enough to recognize that he he didn’t know everything (that was, after all, why he devoted himself so diligently to eavesdropping to better inform himself of the current events afoot about the palace). He forever kept sharp eyes peeled to identify those who seemed smarter than him in any area in order to cultivate their acquaintance and enhance his own understanding by accessing theirs. 

When he realized that the Tirragen boy—Gary believed his name was Alexander—was the most adept page in their year at solving mathematical equations swiftly and accurately, he launched a charm offensive in an attempt to become friends with the boy and benefit from his unparalleled among their peers mathematical genius. However when Alexander of Tirragen responded to all his witticisms and the cheery grins that punctuated his quips with a blank, enigmatic stare that stoned further conversational gambits, Gary devised an alternative tactic. 

Slipping into the empty seat beside Alexander in the library without asking permission to deny the other boy an opportunity to refuse him the chair, he engaged in the more direct attack of copying Alexander’s calculations onto his own parchment as covertly as possible but apparently not covertly enough to escape Alexander’s detection. 

“Eyes on your own parchment, Naxen.” Alexander’s elbow jammed into Gary’s ribs with the force of a catapult, ousting the air from Gary’s lungs, which felt as if they were bruising. 

“If you kept your eyes on your own parchment, you wouldn’t see where mine were, Tirragen.” Gary dropped his quill to rub his battered ribcage through his page’s tunic. 

“If our mathematics master spots that our answers are identical, he’ll assign me the same extra hours of Ethics that he does you, and if you think I’m suffering through so much as moment of that dreadful droning because of you, you couldn’t be more wrong if you said the Emerald Ocean was a desert.” Alexander shielded his answers by folding his dark olive hands over them. 

“Luckily for you”—Gary favored Alexander with the merry wink his father deemed his most insolent—“I plan on writing an answer or two wrong so we don’t get caught. I’ve a long term strategy for success.” 

“Your strategy involves cheating.” Alexander’s tone was harsh as the hills from which he hailed. “Didn’t your father ever tell you that cheaters never prosper?” 

“Often and at much length.” Gary’s shrug was languid. “Unfortunately, being an eternally rebellious son, I always disregarded his lectures on the matter and embraced the more morally ambiguous philosophy of to the surreptitious go the spoils.” 

“Surreptitious?” Alexander lifted a slender eyebrow, and Gary thought with a smug smile that Alexander had taken the bait at last. 

“Sneaky,” explained Gary. Now that he had expanded Alexander’s vocabulary, he used the word in context again. “If we’re really surreptitious, I could help you with your reading and writing assignments in exchange for you guiding me through the mires of mathematics.” 

“Reading and writing is difficult for me,” Alexander admitted something which Gary was aware of through observation already after a moment’s hesitation. Confessing any vulnerability was rare in the cutthroat realm of the pages wing where everybody was always alert to being backstabbed but such quiet confidences were the secrets that built solid friendships. “Common isn’t my first language. The tongue of the hillmen is, you know.”

Gary hadn’t known that (although he supposed with a flicker of shame that he should have been more astute and guessed) and because that knowledge was power over Alexander, he leveled their relationship by saying, “Mathematics makes me yank out my hair. Even teaching me how to count drove my tutor to despair. By the time I learned to add and subtract, he was bald as an egg from pulling out his hair.” 

“I don’t believe it,” Alexander said, but there was a small smirk on his lips and crinkle around his eyes that told Gary they had shared their first joke as friends. “You’re as bad a liar as you are a cheat.”


End file.
